Over the first two seasons of Taylor Sheridan’s star-powered, high-octane spy thriller series “Lioness,” certain patterns and rhythms have been established, making it easier to navigate the deep-in-the-weeds geopolitics.
1. Zoe Saldaña’s Joe McNamara, the head of the U.S. military’s special ops program known as Lioness, recruits a badass and battle-tested but emotionally scarred and combative soldier to infiltrate a target on a mission so dangerous it’s borderline suicidal. In Season One, the new lioness operative was Laysla De Oliveira’s Cruz; for the sophomore campaign, it was Genesis Rodriguez’s helicopter pilot Carillo. (Both actresses turned in fiercely captivating performances, and it’s great to see both back for Season 3.)
2. Joe and her team of wisecracking and world-weary but ferociously effective operatives regularly find themselves in the middle of chaotic, blood-spattered, rip-roaring battle sequences—some of the best action scenes rendered on any TV series this decade.
3. Because most of this stuff is supposed to stay off the grid and is borderline legal at best, Joe is regularly summoned to meetings involving her icy mentor, Kaitlyn Meade (the TV-ubiquitous Nicole Kidman); Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (who else but Morgan Freeman); NSA Chief Damian Hollar (Bruce McGill), White House Chief of Staff Mason (Jennifer Ehle); and CIA Deputy Director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly). There’s a lot of reprimanding and “You’re on thin ice!” type talk, but Joe always gets the green light to proceed.
4. To help us catch our breath from the harrowing, massive action set pieces, we get a steady diet of quieter domestic moments. Days or even hours after having just killed enemy combatants while suffering bruises and sometimes worse, Joe returns home to her handsome, gray-haired pediatric surgeon husband Neal (Dave Annable) and her daughters Kate and Charlie (Hannah Love Lanier and Celistina Harris). Joe and Neal survived some rocky times but now behave like heated-up teenagers whenever she comes home—but soon the phone will ring, and Neal will be left to make breakfast for the kids and take them to school while Joe gears up and leads the team on another covert mission to save the world.
We also get glimpses of the home lives of Kelly’s Westfield, who coaches his son’s Little League baseball team, and Kidman’s Meade, who lives in an enormous and chilly-looking house straight out of “The Others” with her husband Errol (Martin Donovan), a wealthy investment banker with deep and perhaps dark political connections.
It’s a winning formula, with Sheridan returning to the territory he so expertly mined in writing the feature film “Sicario,” one of the best films of the 2010s. For Season 3, “Lioness” amps up the action and increases the personal risk factor, reflecting the real-life chaos of today’s geopolitical landscape while telling fictional—if mostly plausible—stories. Instead of getting involved in admittedly large-scale and casualty-laden battles in Mexico or stateside, the team now finds itself on the front lines of a full-scale war overseas—a war described by one operative as World War I meets “Star Wars,” with soldiers literally climbing out of trenches with bayonets while a seemingly endless swarm of high-tech drones buzz overhead, raining fire on the enemy. It’s TV with the scale and sheer visceral impact of a well-budgeted war movie.
“Lioness” remains a star vehicle for Saldaña as Season 3 reminds us that Joe can’t really leave her job at the doorstep once she returns home, but the series has wisely expanded its scope to feature more of Joe’s team—which raises the dramatic stakes because we’ve come to care about this group, who in this latest assignment find themselves in WAY over their heads. Amidst all the flashy pyrotechnics—the cool, blue-tinged cinematography of extensive battles, the fog and mist and smoke of war, the drone P.O.V. shots—we’re holding our breath that Jill Wagner’s Bobby and LaMonica Garrett’s Tucker and James Jordan’s Two Cups, et al., make it back in one piece, or at least without too many pieces missing. (Taylor Sheridan also makes an indelible impression as an actor, bringing a rough-hewn edge to the veteran Delta Force operator Cody Spears, who wryly notes, “There’s a reason an old soldier is an old soldier.”)
The dialogue in “Lioness” isn’t always Sorkin-esque. It takes skilled actors to pull off lines such as, “You’d be taking Putin’s queen off the chessboard,” and “You know honeypot? I hold the jar.” Fortunately, the ensemble cast is one of the best in the business, whether we’re talking about the Oscar-winning Kidman, Saldaña and Freeman, reliable veteran hands such as Kelly, Donovan and McGill, or younger stars such as Laysla De Oliveira and Genesis Rodriguez. As much as Zoe Saldaña remains the heart of this series, carrying the load with nomination-worthy aplomb, “Lioness” has such a rich bounty of supporting characters that even if Joe decided to take a desk job and make it home for dinner with the family every night, the series could carry on for years to come.
The first three episodes of “Lioness” Season 3 were made available for review.
